Month: July 2014
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Our 2 conceptions of work: work as toil vs. work as performance
Yesterday, I wrote about the three ways of making a living, and I still have many implications to spell out. Today, I set this subject off to the side and turn to a related topic, this being our conceptions of work. I believe that there are only two conceptions that vie and belie each other, that each…
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The only 3 ways of making a living: Reflections on sustaining life
Yesterday, I had a breakthrough in how I think about economic relationships when these are understood in the most basic terms possible. The occasion for my thinking about this question is my upcoming fall course, ‘The Good Life and Sustaining Life,’ at Kaos Pilots. There are three principal questions that make up the course I’ll be teaching:
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Plenitude: The Romantic feeling of joy
Against the postmodern view that the aim of art is to desecrate what is higher, to transgress sacred boundaries, or to disrupt the status quo, I posit that contemplative art glorifies while active art makes what is more plentiful. The tradition espousing the fullness of being is, of course, Romanticism. For all his bluster against Romanticism as…
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Rejecting art as transgression
It was about five years ago, in 2009, that Roger Scruton’s essay, ‘Beauty and Desecration,’ appeared in City Journal. What is remarkable about the essay is that we had nearly forgotten that art was, until quite recently, not at all concerned with the transgressive and provocative. In fact, it is only after 1930, according to Scruton, that the…
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Envy and admiration: Some important remarks about higher forms of life
1. Now more clearly than before, it occurs to me that all higher forms of life will require renunciation. At the moment of severance, the renunciant points to the lower, gives it a name, and frees himself from its hold. As Hadot shows in his work on ancient philosophy, the ancient philosopher must sever himself from…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 